A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright and/or mask work protection. The copyrgiht and/or mask work owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction of anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright and/or mask work rights whatsoever.
This application relates generally to integrated circuits and relates more specifically to integrated circuits that include pass transistors.
Pass-transistor networks may be used in the formation of integrated circuits, particularly in metal-oxide-semiconductor (xe2x80x9cMOSxe2x80x9d) very large scale integration (xe2x80x9cVLSIxe2x80x9d) logic circuits. A pass transistor is a logical element used to block or conduct logic signals via a control terminal. When the control terminal is active, the logic level presented at the input is passed to the output. When the control terminal is inactive, the output is floating or in a high-impedance state. A pass-transistor network is a logic network formed by joining the inputs and outputs of sets of pass transistors.
As demands on the functional capabilities of integrated circuits continue to increase, so does a general need both to decrease their size and to improve their performance. One factor that may affect the size of the circuit is the manner in which individual elements are laid out. A factor that may affect the performance of the circuit is the presence of hazards, which are generally undesirable transients such as spikes of glitches that are precipitated by unequal path delays.